MimesisSchmesis

It's been awhile

2009-01-19T17:24:00.004-05:00

and I'm back on track. Sort of. Due to some changes in my personal life I've been having to make adjustments, but now I have more time to devote to writing.

At the moment I'm working on a horror whodunit. It's the beginning of a series of stories that I would love to see in graphic novel form because I see the two main characters as going on and solving several other supernatural whodunits. The crazy part is that it starts in 18th century Jamaica.

At the moment I've finished my beat sheet and outline. I've written the opening scene and am working on the set-up. For the moment I'm not going to worry about the amount of historical research I'm going to do. I'll save that stuff for the second draft since it's already easy enough for me to get distracted.

I'll keep you all informed of my progress...

and happy new year!

Just in time for Halloween....

2008-10-12T13:53:00.002-04:00

and because I'm having such a hard time with Secret Society...

I'm starting a horror script that I've had in the back of mind for a while. Actually it IS from the back of my mind : it's based on a pretty nasty nightmare that I had.

Stay tuned for further developments.

SSGH update

2008-09-17T15:47:00.007-04:00

So it's been about a month since my last post and I assure you I have been working.

Not gonna re-do cards, but so far 3 sheets of paper serving as scene details has come in handy.

It's not all been outlines and sub-outlines either: I've been in the trenches, down in the dirty, writing past the Fade In: . Yay me!

At this rate, I'll be done with my first draft by my goal of mid-October.

Since SSGH is an action/family genre, I'll also be viewing and taking notes on several movies in the same genre. I know, I know.. I should be reading the screenplays instead, but I'll save that for the next step for the films I think will be really useful. The first 10 films to watch are
Goonies
Adventures in Babysitting
The Spiderwick Chronicles
Eragon
Speed Racer
Peter Pan
Spirited Away
The Last Starfighter
Short Circuit
Ice Age

80% of those I have already seen, but it'll be interesting to rewatch them with a critical eye. A few of the things I want to look at are act breaks, character development, how themes are treated, and age appropriateness. Peter Pan and Spirited Away are younger than my target audience, but what the hell :-)

Toot toot! All aboard...

2008-08-19T17:38:00.004-04:00

The train has started, but I can get off track quicker than a bad weave and, yeah you guessed it, I'm off track. In my defense I did make it all the way to scene 3 before making a switch .

I'm already deviating from mini-treatment and index cards..Mouhahahahaha.. Burn little bitches, burn. Now I'm incorporating a little more of the characters and set pieces I had in the first drafts. And what do you know it looks like I have the beginnings of another theme. Don't worry

Back to the drawing board.

Fade In:

2008-08-17T14:19:00.002-04:00

Great news! I'm done with all the prep work and am ready to get this thing started in Final Draft. At first doing all the paragraph, mini-treatment, index card stuff was a pain but I think in the end it'll be really helpful mainly because I know have a track to follow.

A picture of my index cards

2008-07-24T11:40:00.005-04:00

This is the first time I'm doing this and already I see some advantages. I won't get even get into the procrastination possibilities. It did take a bit of effort on my part to resist the urge to not only organize the color of the push pins like I did with the color of the index cards.

The Kitty Kat Push pins indicate a turning point and I have them where my act 1 turns, at the mid point and at the act 2 turning point. I put scene sequences together so some of those cards have 3 or 4 other cards underneath them. The yellow card at the top and middle is my working logline just to remind me to stay on target. Don't worry, no dead Muffins or kung-fu fighting grannies in this draft!

One of the main advantages is that I can visually look and see where I'm going to have some issues. Maybe you can see what those are?
Act 1 I'm OK... Act 2 to the midpoint I have too much going on... From the midpoint to Act 3 turn I don't have enough... My act 3 is just pitifully nebulous at this point.

ADHD in full effect

2008-07-21T17:45:00.002-04:00

No I haven't fallen off the edge of the world.. I just got distracted and then got distracted again and then again. I'm sure all my ADD people will feel me on how easy it is...

Anyway, I may have been too distracted to post updates on here, but I have been working on my screenplay. I really have :-)

As of today I'm done with the first draft of the mini-treatment. Also, since I'm going to try the index card technique, I'm halfway finished with that. So far I'm noticing that I have way too much stuff that happens before my mid point, I'll have to see if I can move any of that stuff to after the mid point...

I promise to soon have a picture up of what my index card poster board looks like.

Stay cool!!

Math problems of the week

2008-05-17T10:21:00.006-04:00

Yesterday, I went over to my friend Irene's after having dinner and $4 margerita's at the Harlem Blockheads. By the way that Blockhead's has great food but I think blasting the 90's crappy techno at 7 PM is a bit too much, especially since you can barely hear yourself talk.

Irene teaches math to 9th and 10th graders and she had to make a lesson plan for her class. While I waited, I thought for shits and giggles I'd do the worksheets she was going to teach. WOW. I can't believe how much I forgot. The first worksheet was a practice SAT and the second was all about the number i. I got 11 out of 16 right on the SAT and maybe 1 out of 10 right on the i :-( . Plus it took me like 20 minutes to do the SAT questions! That's disappointing since math was always my favorite subject, my best subject and I was a physics major!

Just to keep that part of my brain active I'll be trying out some random math problems throughout the week. Ok some might see it as me procrastinating on writing my screenplay, but I'm sure those synapses I'm going to rekindle will help with writing..... At least that's my excuse.

So here we go:

1. Factor completely. x² - 6x + 9

2. Pythagorean Theorem: a=5; b=17; c= ????

3. Solve this quadratic equation : 200 = 8x^{2

Answers to be provided next week. Have fun!}

Goodbye to a friend

2008-05-15T12:10:00.005-04:00

After spending last week away on a business trip, I returned home Saturday, to discover that my sweet 18 year old cat Baby Boy had died.

I didn't have him for the full time. I got him from a man in my office building who was retiring. Baby Boy was an office cat and had always lived in an office. When the owner was retiring, he was moving and couldn't take Baby Boy with him. None of the workers could take Baby Boy either.

One day when I saw him in the elevator, I told him how much his cat looked like my cat in Cincinnati who suddenly got sick and had just died a few days earlier - before I could bring her to NYC. Coincidentally enough, her name was Baby Girl. Here's a picture I took on my camera phone the day I had to take her and Niger to my cousin's house until I was settled in NYC.

The man in the elevator was practically in tears telling me that he had no one to take his cat and I was practically in tears talking about my cat. To make a long story short, I agreed to take Baby Boy.

It took about a year for him to get used to Niger and not try and claw her eyes out whenever she came near him. They finally got to the point where he would allow her to groom him and the two of them became very close. The first night without him, she went from room to room meowing like mad. She's never done that before and I can only assume it was because she was looking for him

Unfortunately for the past few months Baby Boy really started to show his age. He couldn't hear so good, couldn't see so well, walked a little slower, slept a lot more, needed a lot more cuddling and hugs, and expressed more hesitation before jumping up on the bed and other high places.

I've been working from home since March and Baby Boy's main place of rest during my working hours was on my desk, curled up with his head on my arm.

He was a sweet and wonderful cat to me and a wonderful friend to Niger. He will be missed. :-)

After thinking back on it, I think that for the past few weeks I have been forcing him to stay alive. He suddenly didn't want to eat and was spending more time alone. I also noticed that he didn't purr as much as he used to. I countered this by getting all his favorite food and seeking him out whenever he was hiding. Trust me this wasn't hard because my apartment isn't THAT big, so there's not many places he could go. The main place he'd go is the bathtub, which coincidentally was the place I found him.

Thanks for reading Baby Boy's story and hugs to any one who's also lost a pet.

Stuff I hate and you should to.. #1

2008-05-02T11:10:00.004-04:00

Don't you hate it when you're out shakin' your bacon at Basement Bhangra and you just know that you'll be able to watch Lost the next day on abc.com but you find out the no matter what you do the player doesn't work? Grrrrr.

What am i building a frigging spaceship or a screenplay?

2008-04-26T13:00:00.003-04:00

So many of my friends know that this is the 8th draft of this story. A few of them have even read every draft and are amazed (read annoyed) that each draft is a completely different movie. My main problem is that I don't do enough planning up front so the third act isn't as exciting or satisfying as it could be.

Hopefully, I'll be avoiding all of that in this draft because I'm spending so much time up front working on the structure and the plot twists, but why is this shit so hard? I think I'm making it harder than it needs to be....

The Back Story

2008-04-13T11:23:00.005-04:00

This is normally defined as a significantly important event that happens before page 1 to your main character, some moment in their life that makes them the person they are when you write FADE IN: .

In the first drafts of Secret Society, I didn't really focus too much on the Hand, so it was a McGuffin. I've now decided that making the Hand and the kids' interaction with it will make the script more fun. Now there's more of an idea of what's at stake if Rodney fails and Klingsmann gets the Hand in his evil grasp.

So since the Hand is basically now a character in my script, time to get to work on her backstory. The main questions I need to answer are :
- What is it?
- Where is it from?
- What are its limitations?
- Can it be destroyed?
- Why does it negatively affect some people but not others?

The thing with the backstory is that much of it never makes it into your script, it just helps give your characters more dimension so that they will seem like real people with real problems and real issues. This will be the same with the Hand. I think of all those questions, the only ones that will be directly addressed in the screenplay are #3 and #4. The other ones I'll give clues to without coming right out and saying it. It'll be interested to have each of the characters extrapolate their own conclusions based on where they are coming from.

Some movies I think are cool and you should too : Horror

2008-04-04T18:05:00.003-04:00

Growing up black and borderline ghetto and in a city where there was a drive -in, meant that I got to see a lot of horror movies, B movies and kung fu movies at the theater and drive-in. The theater wasn't just any theater, they didn't get the big budget movies, this was a Grindhouse theater. Just about every Saturday I'd go and watch the double (sometimes triple!) feature. I went even more during the summer because my day camp was across the street. Needless to say I'm sure all of those fun - and some grossly inappropriate- films shaped the movie watcher I am today.

Horror movies are fun and if you want to get fancy schmancy about, I ould argue that horror movies are the modern day's version of the Greek tragdey. I bet Greeks had the same sense of shock and disgust when Oedipus ripped his eyes out as audiences in the 70's did when that alien popped out of Kane's chest cavity.

Anyway I'll get to the point! Here's some fun horror movies. If you haven't seen any, take a chance and netflix it if you have and it's been awhile then watch 'em again.

Alien - This will probably be my only well known movie on this list, but what's not to love about this? There's a creepy villain, incredible special effects (for the time), AND the protagonist is female. Before there was Buffy there was Ripley. The entire quadrilogy is good - I even have some appreciation for Resurrection.

Tombs of the Blind Dead (La Noche del terror ciego) - This is the first in a series called Blind Dead. Honestly this is the best and the others use stock footage of the undead rising from this movie. This is good and terrible but a lot of fun!

Zombi 2 - Ever wonder what would happen is a zombie and a shark got into a fight? Watch this movie to find out. It slightly sets up the possibility that there's a zombie shark or 2 swimming around Caribbean waters.

Event Horizon - I still don't know why this movie didn't do better? Maybe it came out during a time when people weren't interested in horror? If you haven't seen it check it out - Laurence Fishburne and Sam Neill are awesome as usual.

The Legend of Hell House - A Richard Matheson masterpiece. This guy inspired many sci-fi and horror writers. If you haven't read anything of his (I am Legend, Stor of Echoes, What Dreams May Come, etc) then do so!

Trilogy of Terror - Also from Matheson shorts. That Zuni fetish doll would beat the stuffing out of Chucky!

Dawn of the Dead - The second in Romero's Dead series. I always thought this one was creepier because it's the aftermath

Eyes without a face (Les yeux sans visage) - OK this isn't very scary but it is BEAUTIFUL and it's creepy factor is all set up in the atmosphere and the characters.

Army of Darkness - Teehee. Do I really need to explain ?

The B Story

2008-04-01T17:25:00.004-04:00

Now that I have the crux of my screenplay together, I'm now thinking about what can be added to give it more dimension... Enter the B Story otherwise known as the subplot. The quick definition of the B story is a secondary plot that runs at the same time as the main (A) story and sometimes ends up being the love story depending on the script.

From what I've noticed, sub-plots can positively affect your A story, negatively affect your A story, or mirror your A story but not really affect it. I'm sure it can do more but those are off the top of my head.

At the moment, I'm leaning towards two subplots : one that will positively affect the A story and the other that will negatively affect it. One is a love story of sorts (my main character makes new friends) and the other is an unrequited love story (secondary character wants recognition from his father). So far I know it sounds really cliche, but let's hope I can do it in an interesting way.

Eureka

2008-03-25T16:03:00.002-04:00

Yippie! The idea of approaching my Act 2 from the standpoint of how to make my MC learn what he needs to learn worked! Now that I have the simple beats down, time to get busy on the details.

I must resist the urge to immediately start re-writing in Final Draft though. I'm hoping that the more I can get worked out in an outline before I open Final Draft, then the more focused my writing will be and the less chopping I'll have to do later.

Stuck in the middle with me

2008-03-23T20:11:00.003-04:00

I admit I've been spending lots of time thinking about the structure of my screenplay and I'm...well...stuck. I don't know if it's because I don't know the characters as well as I thought or if it's because I don't have enough story, or if it's something totally different. I know my beginning. Given the genre and the target audience (sci-fi/adventure/family) I know my ending.

But what about the middle?

I'm going to start looking at this from a different perspective: what does Rodney (the MC) need to learn in order to get to where he is in Act 1 to where he is at the end? What actions does he need to take, what does he need to succeed and fail in in order to get him to where he needs to be at the end?

Wish me cyber-luck!

Screenplay writing workflow

2008-02-14T22:05:00.002-05:00

I've never been a toe dipper so I usually just dive right in to anything I do with full gusto and steam. The same is true with writing. I'll have an idea and then I'll start writing. Sounds cool, but the problems come when I get to the mid point of my screenplay. By the time I get to FADE OUT, the ending is very different than the beginning and the two just don't match.

Take for example the first draft of Glass Hand. I wrote it during a Gotham Writer's class I was taking. It was fun getting that first draft out in 7 weeks but, my screenplay that started off as a cute and cuddly kid's film ended up being a scary thriller complete with a throat slitting of a puppy (heretofore knows as The Muffin Incident™ )
The next draft was more kid friendly but was completely boring because I took out all the scary stuff. The third draft had too many characters. The fourth draft didn't put the focus on my main character... Obviously my problem isn't sitting down and doing the writing, it's know what the hell to focus on!

So for the 5th draft, I'm going another route that's completely unlike me: I'm planning it out first and here are my steps:

The Logline: A one sentence description of who and what my screenplay is about.
3 act breakdown: One sentence devoted to each act that briefly describes what happens. This will also serve as as a paragraph that I can tweak when it comes time to market.
Theme: This might be a little early in the process to decide this, but I think knowing it might help with
Plot Twists : The main ones happen at the end of Act 1, the middle of Act 2 and the end of Act 2.
Opening Image and Final Image: I like the idea of these being like bookends, that mirror each other.
Outlining : At the moment, I like the Blake Snyder method and am using his beat sheets. There are tons of other books and methods out there though.
Mini-Treatment : 4 pages of exposition of what happens during the screenplay. Page 1 is for Act 1, Pages 2-3 are for Act 2 and page 4 is for Act 3. Mini treatments can be much longer, but I think I'll stick to the 4 pager for now.
Scenes: A quick listing of important scenes

If I work this way, I'll be in much better shape when it comes time to sit down and type Fade In:
Somewhere in there I'll need to revise this workflow for dealing with characters. I haven't thought about it where this would go yet because I've been working with the characters from SSGH for well over a year now.

Right now for SSGH, I'm at #5. I hope to be completed with #8 by April 15.

My Family Movie Screenplay

2008-02-10T11:48:00.000-05:00

Is proving harder than I thought to write. Maybe I'm secretly anally retentive and I didn't know?

I must be because I'm on the 5th draft and I keep going back to basics with character and plotting. Something just doesn't work after the midpoint and I'm not sure what...

Election 2008

2008-02-10T10:48:00.000-05:00

Primary season is shaping up to be very interesting. Without getting too much into politics just yet, I just have to say that it's curious the amount of money that the candidates are raising and spending.

I mean damn, if Mitt got it like that to just throw away 35 million and suspend his campaign, Rudy can lose millions of his money by not doing anything, Hillary can raise 10 million after loaning to herself, Barack can get 7 million in 3 days, why is our economy is such bad shape?

I want my candidate to win (Go Obama!) and even donated, but at what point does this raising and spending of millions upon millions get ridiculous?